CeBIT News

Imagine yourself in a situation that involves transferring money between bank accounts. Instead of filling out a paper slip at the bank or completing an online deposit slip, you simply store a photograph of a transfer slip on your smartphone. When you want to make a transfer, you enter your information into the slip and send the edited photo to your bank. Because the slip is digitalized, the bank automatically checks the data, processes the payment and completes the transaction.

Bank customers may soon have access to a mobile app that performs this exact function. The prototype, created by GFT Technologies AG on behalf of a German bank, will premiere at CeBIT (News - Alert) next week. “The wide range of functionalities offered by the latest generation of smartphones is making it possible to provide a variety of exciting mobile banking solutions – apps that add genuine value for customers,” said Christopher Ortiz, Managing Director at GFT UK.

Mobile banking apps are growing in sophistication, offering a wide variety of services to customers. In addition to photographing transfer slips, many mobile apps offer customers the chance to do something similar with deposit slips. Instead of filling out a deposit slip and transporting a check to the bank or to the ATM, customers can photograph the check, photograph the deposit slip and send everything to their bank remotely. Other mobile banking functionality includes finding local branches and ATMs, bill pay and account access. Some companies, like Chase, offer mobile person-to-person payments.

Security is the number one factor that keeps customers from using mobile banking. However, the number of people who believed that mobile banking is unsafe dropped nearly 15 percent in the last year to just 37 percent of customers. “It is a legitimate channel now and it needs to be treated like one instead of being treated like a poor stepchild of online banking,” said Mary Monahan, executive vice president and research director of Mobile at Javelin Strategy & Research.

“With the Occupy Wall Street movements going on, it's critical that banks look at the way they're opening up their services so that anyone can access them,” Monahan continued. “It is a new service and a new channel. You have to market it and show people how it works.”